1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to magnetic recording hard disk drives (HDDs).
2. Background of the Invention
Magnetic recording hard disk drives (HDDs) have a stack of rigid magnetic recording disks rotated by a spindle motor, and an actuator that moves the read/write heads across the surfaces of the rotating disks, with each disk surface being accessed by an associated read/write head. The disks in the stack are in a fixed position relative to one another and are not movable axially, i.e., in a direction parallel to the axis of rotation of the spindle motor. Each read/write head is formed on an air-bearing slider attached to one end of a suspension, and each suspension is attached at its other end to a rigid arm of the actuator. The conventional HDD can have high performance, i.e., low access time to read or write data, because all of the read/write heads are located on their associated disk surfaces and available to read or write data. However, this also increases the overall height of the disk stack because the axial spacing between the disks must provide sufficient space for the slider-suspension assemblies. Also, the requirement to have a read/write head for each disk surface increases the cost of the HDD.
What is needed is an HDD that may provide lower performance than a conventional HDD, but that has both increased volumetric data density and reduced data storage cost, in dollars per gigabyte ($/GB), than a conventional HDD.